As a fiscal conservative, I would normally applaud a decision to give an enormous budget surplus back to citizens, as our government proposed in its great pre-election giveaway. Financial Secretary Henry Tang Ying-yen said he would 'give back' HK$20 billion of the HK$55 billion budget surplus. In this case, I hope that Mr Tang has not overdone his generosity, given some of the urgent environmental matters to be attended to, which will cost money.
From 1997 to 2003, Hong Kong went through the longest period of economic recession in its post-war history, experiencing years of budget deficits. Many worthy projects and necessary investments were shelved or postponed, as unaffordable. These included environmental investments, such as the following two examples.
The bad state of water quality in our harbour, and the treatment of the raw sewage that is pumped into it, is a long-running saga. A start was made with the commissioning of the first stage of the Harbour Area Treatment Scheme in 2001, to treat sewage from Kowloon and parts of Hong Kong Island: it led to significant improvements in water quality.
Controversies over that project led the government to appoint an international panel of experts to advise it on the next stage. This panel advised government that in stage two, all sewage from the harbour should be given secondary treatment. Sewage is currently given primary treatment, which essentially involves only the removal of solids. Secondary treatment removes harmful bacteria and other impurities, and is the norm in developed countries - even mainland China.
But the panel's recommendation was ill-timed: the government decided secondary treatment was too expensive, so it would stick with primary treatment for stage two. To achieve further disinfection 'on the cheap', it proposed to chlorinate the primary-treated sewage.
The planned chlorination plant will be by far the world's biggest, using the equivalent of 6.1 per cent of the total industrial consumption of chlorine in the US last year. Experts, however, have pointed to the unacceptable environmental risks associated with such large-scale use of chlorine.
